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Wednesday, September 30, 2015

In 1999 I published my first work of ‘criticism’ and
‘poetics’ in a book that deliberately mixed reviews I had published on linguistically
innovative writers and the ‘linguistically innovative’ poetics of my own
writing, particularly the then-still advancing Twentieth Century Blues. In both cases this was a selection,
leaving out, for example, an essay on David Miller that had appeared in a
Stride volume already (for Far Language
was published in the Stride Research series) and a series of overlapping pieces
on Paul Evans that had appeared in several places (interestingly, parts of it
turn up in the Introduction I wrote for the Selected Poems of Paul Evans, The Door at Taldir, that I edited a few
years ago for Shearsman). I excluded the gloriously-indulgent reviews I
produced for New Statesman which were
rich in insult against the Movement Orthodoxy (some re-appeared in samidzat
from Ship of Fools). It built up a picture of British Poetry of its time, and
some of it found its re-written way into ThePoetry of Saying(or even beyond). When I moved to work at Edge Hill in 1996 and turned my
back on literary reviewing in favour of literary criticism, I also left behind the concise, telegraphese of some of these
pieces, particularly the ones I wrote for the paper version of Pages (precursor of this blog; see
here): having few actual pages free I squeezed the criticism into as few as
possible, and used every line – but in the process invented a style, I think.
(See the pieces on Adrian Clarke, Ulli Freer, Maggie O’Sullivan and Bob
Cobbing, for example, though the latter was for And).

The poetics again is selective (my interlinked early 1990s Ship of Fools net-(k)not-works, influenced by Roubaud's The Great Fire of London, was my most intricate attempt at poetics), but the pieces
here relate to a developing writing practice and to the overall construction of Twentieth Century Blues(and ‘Poetic
Sequencing and the New’ is indeed part of the poem itself). ‘Propositions 1987’, flawed perhaps, in interesting for its attempts to define
postmodernism in a way that didn’t mean what it had come to mean for mainstream
British poetry, Craig Raine, for example.

There is still stuff that is relevant here. Perhaps as
confirmation of that fact: it is a surprise to find 5 chapters of the book already
on-line. But having the files, typed at the expense of the research fund of EdgeHillUniversity, I sent them
to various places (I was not slow to see the eventual importance of the
internet, despite my reputation as a technophobe, and a free repository of literary ideas). These are:

‘Far Language’, on Barry MacSweeney, whose phrase this is
and was used, with permission, as the title of the book (see here); ‘Poetic Sequencing and the New’ (see here); 'Buoyant Readings',
about Bruce Andrews and others (see here); ‘Sightings and Soundings’, on Bob Cobbing (see here).

Rupert Loydell (who published the book) writes about Far Language and ‘The Education of
Desire’ here.

I shall be reprinting one chapter a week, including links to
these, until the book is re-published entire online. With an index amassing here as I go:

Wednesday, September 23, 2015

This is the third level of analysis in the thesis of The Poetry of Saying. The first may be read about here. The second may be read about here. There is a general introduction here. Levinas
might be thought a strange philosopher to use in a defence of poetry, since he
has stated categorically that art can only be a ‘shadow’ that dimly represents
reality. ‘The artist has given the statue a lifeless life, a derisory life
which is not master of itself, a caricature of life.’ As representation,
art remains wholly within the realm of perception, whereas criticism, or
philosophy proper, is a superior discourse, because it remains conceptual. ‘The
most lucid writer finds himself in the world bewitched by its images,’ whereas
‘the interpretation of criticism speaks in full self-possession, frankly,
through concepts, which are like the muscles of the mind.’ Levinas' very
rhetoric here, in this 1948 essay ‘Reality and Its Shadow’ (which had to carry
an editorial disclaimer when first published in the flagship of literary
commitment, Les Temps Modernes) reveals a bitterness about, perhaps even
a sense of betrayal by, an activity which he warned was ‘not the supreme value
of civilization ... having its place, but only a place, in man's
happiness.’But even this formulation
suggests that there is a modest role for art; to recover art for Levinas'
ethical project one needs to redefine art, not as stale representation of
bewitching imagery, or as something without a conceptual dimension, but as
something capable of being open to a dialogue with the other.

The face of the other, Levinas argues, presents an immediate,
non-negotiable, ethical demand, one that transforms an individual, as he or she
is obliged to respond and answer. This encounter is the foundational moment for
ethics, which, for Levinas, is ‘first philosophy’. He is not concerned to
define a particular morality or law, the theological or social codification of
these precepts, but of a basic ethical condition, which Derrida has
called ‘an Ethics of Ethics’, one embodied in actual interhuman situations. Levinas writes:

The proximity of the other is the face's meaning.... The other
becomes my neighbour precisely through the way the face summons me, calls for
me, begs for me, and in so doing recalls my responsibility, and calls me into
question... It is the responsibility of a hostage which can be carried to the
point of being substituted for the other person and demands an infinite
subjection of subjectivity.

As proof,
and example, of the last point, of the essential asymmetricality of the
relationship between self and others, even when the other seems not to
reciprocate, or when the other has died and the individual persists as a
survivor (the analogy with the Jews after the Holocaust is intended), Levinas
is fond of quoting from an artwork, one he should condemn for its umbrageous
illusoriness rather than utilizing its conceptual acuity: Dostoyevsky's The
Brothers Karamazov. ‘We are all responsible for everyone else - but I am
more responsible than all the others’.

Tim Woods’ article ‘Memory and Ethics in Contemporary Poetry’
traces an important theoretical shift within the work of the British
discontents by theorizing a Levinasian ‘ethics of form’ to supplement the more
familiar ‘politics of form’. Woods, who has been active within this poetry,
argues

Language attesting to the ‘heard word’ of the other in sound,
becomes the basis for an ethical poetics....an ethics of the voice is attention
to what interrupts. That ‘alternative’ other is partly what much contemporary
British ... ‘experimental’ poetry is seeking; to release the Utopian other in
writing.

I shall
return to the interruptions of literary experimentation, to this interaction of
technique and ethics.

Woods’ use of ‘voice’ here instead of ‘face’ points to Levinas’
later thought, one partly caused by the linguistic turn his work took in the
1960s, whose result was the theory of Otherwise than Being, or Beyond
Essence of 1974. The central element of this pacifist ethics, for my
purposes, is the distinction between the saying and the said.

Levinas’ most fruitful remark for this ethics of form is contained
in a series of
assertionsmade in a 1981 interview that draws on this pair of terms.

Man can give himself in saying to the point of poetry - or he can
withdraw into the non-saying of lies. Language as saying is an ethical
openness to the other; as that which is said - reduced to a fixed
identity or synchronized presence - it is an ontological closure of the other.

Saying is
the call of, the call to, the other, and the fact of the need and obligation to
respond to, and become responsible for, the other, as Levinas had always
maintained. It is a quasi-transcendental state beyond being, yet it is also ‘a
performative doing’, as Simon Critchley puts it, ‘that cannot be reduced to a
constantive description’. It is the site and performance of ethics because of
this obligation to respond. It is public, yet it does not communicate anything
but the desire to communicate. Thus explained it seems like a philosophical
version of interhuman phatic communion that precedes, or in comfortable
circumstances replaces, actual informational communication. Indeed Levinas has
indicated that passing the time of day about the weather may embody such a
gesture. As Levinas explains: ‘Saying opens me to the other before saying what
is said.’ We cannot, as in his everyday example, but not reply (even with
silence). Yet importantly Levinas recognizes difference as a corollary of such
proximity, one which avoids the violence of assimilation, or even the need to
express unity with the other. Levinas' earlier sense of the individual as a
hostage, committed to response, as a permanent possible substitute for the
other, even as a sacrifice to the act of proximity, is re-introduced in this
linguistic recasting: saying is a metaphor for what cannot be said; saying
makes us into signs of significations without content. It is the gift of
openness that is the very ethicality Levinas posits. Yet this cannot be
painlessly achieved.

This saying can be defined apart from, but is not found other than
interwoven with, the said. There is a price to pay; for the saying to appear
it has to undergo a betrayal, a ‘subordination of the saying to the said’, to
the linguistic system, to ontology.As Robert Eaglestone explains:

It is impossible to say the saying because at the moment of saying
it becomes the said, betrayed by the concrete language which is the language of
ontology. The saying, which is unthematizable, impossible to delimit, becomes
limited, thematized, said.

Yet the
saying is what interrupts the said, ruptures the said. The saying ‘appears’ as
a knot catching in the thread of the said. This is its necessary condition of
falling into essence in language. Indeed, without this knottiness it would not
have its being or effectivity. However, ‘The said ...arises in the saying’.It is the point at which ‘clarity occurs, and
thought aims at themes’.The said and
the saying both support, yet react against, one another, hence the tragic
lifting towards poetry and the fateful thematizatation in ontological solidity.
The ‘otherwise than being’ which is found in the act of saying is ‘betrayed in
the said which dominates the saying which states it’.

This outline suggests that uncovering the saying in the said is
the task of philosophy; it seems to suggest, in an echo ofLevinas’ early theory, that art would belong
to the realm of essences, ‘in which the said is reduced to apure theme -, to absolute exposition’ ) and
that only criticism (by which he meant philosophy) could uncover the saying.
But it is Robert Eaglestone's argument, and Levinas' own belief, if we take
seriously the notion that ‘man can give himself in saying to the point of
poetry’ that the qualities of saying occur in art. Eaglestone reminds us that
‘the poem must interrupt in the name of the saying ... as literary texts, they
work as “prophecy”, fracturing the said.’ They must open to the other; they are
saying as well as said. Indeed he sees Levinas' own Otherwise than Being
structured as a literary work, ‘especially self-reflexive contemporary
postmodern poetry and prose’.It is
precisely its foregrounded artifice that makes it so, that attempts to keep the
saying, the interruption, open in the text we read. According to Eaglestone:
‘In his style of writing and choice of metaphors Levinas performatively
foregrounds language in order to disrupt the said’.

This description of Levinas’ literary practice recalls Woods’
similar assertion about the interruptive nature of the technical devices
of the British Poetry Revival and Linguistically Innovative Poetry. The
technically defamiliarising poetry that imposes such a task of dialogue on any
reader may indeed be a poetry of an open saying rather than of a closed
saidness. The the 1990s self-interruptive texts of Tom Raworth, with their lateral
shiftings, or the neologistically resistant materiality of Maggie O’Sullivan’s
poems, are works which court the refusal of a saidness that we might equate
with paraphrase and the empirical lyricism of the Movement Orthodoxy.

Writing as saying is ethical, processual, interhuman, dialogic in
Bakhtin’s sense. Writing as said is ontological and fixed, warlike; a closure
of the other, monologic in Bakhtian terms. This is why so much poetry of the
orthodoxy attempts what is arguably an irresponsible closure that is a violence
towards the possible agility and response of a reader. In less elevated terms
we might argue that it even insults the intelligence of the reader. As the
other of the writer is the reader, then the other of the text is the act of
reading and the reader in it, prolonging its saying.

There cannot be a poetry of pure saying; the saying must exist in
the said, as ghost to its host. A text in very physical terms needs to be
printed, the order of words (usually) fixed. The openness that is its gesture must
go hand in hand with some thematic or semantic fixity, however that is resisted
by delayed naturalization. For the saying to be witnessed at all, it must turn
into the said. We cannot know the saying from the said.

Conversely, there cannot be a poetry of the pure said, since only
the performance of saying could body forth the said, and as it does it both
supports and disrupts the said. The musical and metrical life of Movement
poetry, for example, cannot simply be argued away. However, one of the effects
of the deliberate will towards saidness in Movement verse is its
articulation in social terms, often extending into an invasive ontological
violence at the level of theme which might be called the attempt to articulate
the other; where the writer literally speaks the, in actuality, unknown
thoughts of another. It may be found in the use of the false consenual ‘we’ as
when Larkin informs his reader that ‘our’ love will survive ‘us’.

‘Saying makes signs to the other, but in this sign signifies the
very giving of signs,’ argues Levinas. Yet it is this openness that readers
find already in a number of writers (including Allen Fisher), an openness that
allows readers to find the necessity to enter the artifice, to articulate the
interruptions in the discourse, to enter into an active relationship with the
textual other. The text is a gift that may be brought to a thematized rest only
after having been given or taken to the point of poetry. The text and its
other, which is the act of reading, are brought together. When this poetry is
successful it is arguably able to articulate that saying in the said of the
dialogic performance of the book. A successful reading will be one that exposes
the saidness of the text to an openness of performance since saying, Critchley
reminds us, is a ‘performative doing’.

(Another way of valorising reading is to suggest that there must
exist a corollary of the interdependence of the saying and the said in a
reader’s act of reading, as against the reader’s sense of the read,
as the already read, the thematized said, completed. Indeed Derek Attridge
defines an act of innovative ‘reading as an attempt to respond to the otherness
of the other’, working performatively with the text and ‘working against the
mind’s tendency to assimilate the other to the same, attending to that which
can barely be heard’, in ways which remind us of the ethical asymmetricality a
reader must face with a text. (This is indeed a moment of osculation between The Poetry of Saying and The Meaning of Form.)

Terms from speech act theory, such as Critchley’s, are often used
to describe the relation between the saying and the said. Jill Robbins, for
example, echoes Critchley, and writes:

The Saying and the Said is a correlative relation ... that marks
the difference between a conative speech, oriented towards the addressee,
interlocutionary and ethical, and a speech oriented towards the referent, more
like a speaking about than a speaking to the other.

The necessity of saying arises before self-identity, and indeed
breaks up the sense of identity, emphasizes the approach of the undeniable
other, as a reader active with the devices left by the poem’s saying.
Interruption brings forth dialogue. In a text, where the face-to-face has been
replaced, the responsibility is more acute, from reader to writer, and from
writer to reader. As the author is responsible to the reader, then the reading
is responsible to the writing to preserve reading as an act of saying,
as the reader responds, participates in the text’s structural indeterminacies,
as it ruptures the said, interrupts by effects of defamiliarization, or
suspends like Forrest-Thomson’s good naturalization, through its textual
opacities. These preserve the saying in the said, since they compel the reader
to dwell on the devices of the utterance rather than reducing them, or closing
them, to dead paraphrasable fixities. They preserve reading as an activity,
resist closing it in a summary. Open works are, in a sense, always open books.

A reading which operates as a paraphrase
(and writing which works in collusion with such readings) is an appropriation
of, a fearful taming of, the otherness of the text. In Levinasian terms, it
judges the other in terms of the same; it closes. It attempts to be (or more
more colloquially we would say have) the last word. The relationship
with text is more ethical for not attempting this reduction, this
identification. It recognizes that the text maintains its differences as well
as its proximity, through its technical devices, its social dialogism.
Appropriation must be countered by distanciation. This is a necessary
recognition for both writers and readers in the textual dialogue of their acts
of saying (and reading) in attempting to minimize the thematizing of the said
(and of the read).

One must remain vigilant to the possibility that the concern that
writing may do violence to the other, possibly by a fake ‘saying’ that is
simply a gesturing of responsibility in the thematized language of the said.
Robbins, in her study of Levinas’ theoretic of literature, stresses, ‘We should
not take for granted that we know what we mean by the saying. This is precisely
what is seized upon by Levinas’s readers hoping to extend his positive
evaluations of art to an ethical poetics.’ 57

Both the technical and the social levels contribute to the effects
of making the point of poetry its saying, an interruption, and not its said. To
read is to be proximate to, to face alterity as distance, and be implored to answer,
as Bakhtin would say. To write of this work, or of any work, is also to attempt
to do justice to alterity and diversity.(The rest is analysis: and that's the rest of the book.)

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

A general introduction to the thesis of The Poetry of Saying may be readhere. This is the second level of analysis of the thesis. The first may be accessed here.

That the various entries of various readers into
actual texts is represented as its affirmative moment by such a theory points
towards why the work of the reception theorists is only hinted at by Allen
Fisher and others. The poets’ notions of readership are actual rather
than ideal. When Harwood speaks of leaving an object (the poem) in the
room for others to use, or when Roy Fisher similarly talks of the poem being
used as a subversive catalyst by potential readers, they are thinking of a
clear social authorization for their work, but not one that can be codified or
regulated.

There is a clear difference here between a practice that
sees a social dimension for poetry, embedded in its artifice, and a
poetry that has as its chief dimension mimesis of a recognizable social
world. In the first case the reader has to dialogue with the text; in the
second the social is encoded in the empirical lyricism of the paraphrasable
content, yet such writing runs the risk of becoming monologic, however
accessible (a favoured term of approbation for the orthodoxy).

The
implication of the former case is that no poem is more ‘social’ than any other
since all poems are social facts open to social comprehension (or even
completion in the case of open works). Indeed all utterances are social,
in this sense. The accessibility of an utterance is not a determinant of this.
A mathematical formula that will be understood only by three experts is no less
so than a bald news headline broadcast to the nation via various media and
abroad in several languages.

The sociality of all language derives from its essential
dialogic nature, a determining factor of language and literature first noted by
the Bakhtin circle of critics, and explicitly developed as a social
theory in the work of Vološinov, who stated: ‘The utterance is a social
phenomenon.’

The structure of utterance is precisely social and a
description of language, such as Saussure’s, is an abstraction, a dead system.
The individual speech act is likewise a contradiction in terms.

Life begins only at the
point where utterance crosses utterance, i.e.,where verbal interaction begins,
be it not even “face-to-face” verbal interaction, but the mediated, literary
variety.

This crossing emphasises an
essential instability and dynamism not accounted for by synchronic and static
models of language.

There is
no escape from this process of dialogue. ‘A word is a bridge thrown between
myself and another,’ writes Vološinov;

Word is a two-sided
act....As word, it is precisely the product of the reciprocal
relationship between speaker and listener, addesser and addressee.

Even thinking, or inner
speech, is conceived as a dialogue with the world. ‘There is no such thing as
thinking outside orientation toward possible expression’ in the
socio-ideological sphere. 19 Thought itself resembles ‘the
alternating lines of a dialogue’. 20

While this is of the utmost importance, it is in the
extension of these concepts that confirmation of the dialogic nature of
literary practice is found.

But dialogue can also be
understood in a broader sense, meaning not only direct, face-to-face, vocalized
verbal communication between persons, but also verbal communication of any type
whatsoever. A book, i.e., a verbal performance in print, is also an
element of verbal communication.

This formulation also makes
a text an event rather than an object, and one that engenders further social
events.

It is something discussable in actual, real-life
dialogue, but aside from that, it is calculated for active perception,
involving attentive reading and inner responsiveness, and for organized, printed
reaction in the various forms devised by the particular sphere of verbal
communication in question (book reviews, critical surveys, defining influence
on subsequent works and so on.)

That some of the poetry here has not been part
of many such discussions of British poetry points to the timely nature of this
study, and indeed to this book’s function in developing that alternative
poetics. But, more importantly, the calculation of the active perception of a
literary text is evidence of its dialogic intention. The potentiality of
responsive is more important than the actual response which cannot be forced
and cannot be calculated, as Fisher and Harwood realize. But as Bakhtin writes:
‘The living utterance ... cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living
dialogic threads’ in the consciousnesses of actual readers, receptively
positive or hostile. Vološinov states:

Moreover, a verbal performance of this kind also
inevitably orients itself with respect to previous performances in the same
sphere, both those by the same author and those by other authors. It inevitably
takes its point of departure from some particular state of affairs involving a
... literary style. Thus the printed verbal performance engages, as it were, in
ideological colloquy of large scale: it responds to something, objects to
something, affirms something, anticipates possible responses and objections,
seeks support, and so on.

At one
level this shows a part of this poetics approaching a comprehension of the
field of cultural production in a systemized way, akin to that of the theories
of Pierre Bourdieu, and as such is a reminder of the value of the sociological
mapping of poetries in Chapters One and Two, and Five and Six, both of the
orthodoxy and of the discontents. ‘Any utterance...is only a moment in the
continuous process of verbal communication.’

The
insistence that ‘attentive reading’ is necessary reminds us that ‘to understand
another person’s utterance means to orient oneself with respect to it.’The comprehension of a literary text involves
the kind of engaged reading described by Allen Fisher, as it demands focussed
acts of participation from its readers.

With its
technical resources of openness, indeterminacy and artificiality this poetry
demands social completion:

Any true understanding is dialogic in nature.
Understanding is to utterance as one line of a dialogue is to the next.
Understanding strives to match a speaker’s word with a counterword.

The structures of these
texts work in conformity with dialogic utterance, even if the works are not
well received in the literary world and (this would follow) do not emphasize
social realism and lyrical empiricism. The poetics described here refutes such
comprehension, as a counterword itself, in favour of a comprehension of form in
social terms. The techniques outlined in the previous section lead to the
construction of a text that demands a receptive reading dialogue with its
artifice.

This
social dynamic has been described here in terms of Vološinov’s explicitly
Marxist work, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, but this
insistence upon the dialogic nature of all acts of language is famously present
in the work of his colleague Bakhtin. His work on the polyphonic novel and the
heteroglossic text might be said to be equivalent to the plurovocity Allen
Fisher identifies in his poetics. They both agree that a text itself is a dialogue
in which discourses clash and contest, even beyond the intentionality of its
author, although Fisher favours techniques of creative linkage to achieve this.

However,
at this point of the argument, it is interesting to note the more philosophical
and ethical re-formulation of dialogue in Bakhtin’s work. Language ‘directed
towards its object’, by which Bakhtin means towards its theme,

enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled
environment of alien words, value judgements and accents, weaves in and out of
complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others, intersects
with yet a third group; and all this may crucially shape discourse, may leave a
trace in all its semantic layers, may complicate the expression and influence
its entire stylistic profile.

Not only is the alien word
(an invasion of new or unusual material, which will steer language change)
waiting there; the encounter with the counter word is anticipated. ‘Every word
is directed toward an answer and cannot escape the profound influence of
the answering word that it anticipates.’Linguistic exchange (and that must include performances in print) is a
question of answerability, an encounter with an other, and one in which
response entails responsibility. Hwa Yol Jung has identified ‘an affinity
between the structural requirement of ‘answerability’ (‘response-ability’) in
Bakhtin’s dialogical principle and Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of proximity,
which privileges the face and epitomizes human co-presence and interhuman presence
in terms of the structural primacy of the other.’

Monday, September 14, 2015

As you may be aware, a (political) decision has been made to cut the
Creative Writing A Level that many people worked so hard to see introduced. A petition has
now been started and if we get enough signatures this will have to be raised in
the House of Commons, so do please sign and urge others to do the same.

I'm deeply concerned, as a teacher of creative writing at
university level, and as a theorist of its developing practice into an
autonomous academic subject (with a pedagogy separate from English) that this A
Level - replete with chances to access the cognitive contents and challenges of
literary form, and its opportunities for critical thinking, as well as creative
engagement, should be discontinued. The reason for this seems to be a supposed lack of
'knowledge base' in favour of 'skills', but a knowledge of a range of
linguistic and artistic forms (again, with their own cognitive content, as much
of my academic literary criticism attempts to prove) is a knowledge of the
means for advanced rigorous thinking and reflection. It is not a simple a
writing skills course. At any level.

Wednesday, September 09, 2015

This is the first level of analysis associated with the thesis of The Poetry of Saying. A general account (and further links) may be accessed here. At the level of technique
the work of the British Poetry Revival and the Linguistically Innovative Poetry
that followed, differs from that of the Movement and its still dominant
orthodoxy.The Movement style privileges a poetry of closure, narrative
coherence and normative grammatical and syntactic cohesion, which colludes with
the processes of naturalization, that is, with the ‘attempt to reduce the
strangeness of poetic language and poetic organization by making it
intelligible, by translating it into a statement about the non-verbal external
world,’ as Veronica Forrest-Thomson puts it. Its poetry becomes an empirical
lyricism of discrete moments of experience. Its insistence upon tone, and the
speaking voice, strives to maintain the effect of a stable ego, present in the
discourse as the validating source of the utterance. The principle of the
Movement’s metrical practice, although used with greater laxity through the
decades, has largely relied upon the iambic pentameter to level the tone, which
both controls, and assists in the maintenance of, a coherent ‘voice’.

Postmodernism is a term I use exclusively in
Lyotard’s sense of defining a condition, a generalized philosophical
worldview, one that is useful to introduce a particular poetics of technique.
Knowledge, scientific knowledge in particular, is not so much the result of the
recording of empirical investigation but involves a permanent condition of
exploratory and incomplete process. Rules are not normative prescriptions but
are produced coterminously with the event or process they regulate. Rather than
claiming, as has the orthodoxy, that a certain ‘irony’ and cultural melange
denote postmodernist poetic practice, Lyotard’s formulation of the now famous
resistance to grand narratives also involves a commitment to exploratory
techniques that are spelt out precisely in terms of poetics:

A
postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he
writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by preestablished
rules.... Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking
for. The artist and the writer, then, are working without rules in order to
formulate the rules of what will have been done.’

Any activity will be
‘producing not the known, but the unknown’.In a purely literary sense, this suggests a mode of writing which
acknowledges that its only possible condition is one of technical development,
a process of working towards new, and initially difficult, meanings, and delaying
naturalization. It cannot be the formulation of a product from prior
assumptions of meaning. Larkin’s insistence of poetry as empirical
reconstruction:

if
you’ve seen this sight, felt this feeling, had this vision, and have got to
find a combination of words that will preserve it by setting it off in other
people

is clearly inadequate.

This leads directly to the centrality of the notions of
discontinuity and indeterminacy as technical elements of poetics, notions which
Umberto Eco, writing of certain musical compositions in 1959, recognized were
derived from science: ‘indeterminacy as a valid stepping-stone in the cognitive
process’ and discontinuity as ‘an essential stage in all scientific
verification procedures’. Perception(Eco also has in mind the phenomenology of Merleau Ponty) is an
indeterminate process, both for the writer writing and for the reader reading,
to an extent denied by Larkin’s attempted poetic preservation. There is in the
work discussed in this study a preference for, an imperative towards, various
forms of indeterminacy: structural, syntactic, semantic and metrical; the
effects of these difficulties will be to emphasize the activation of the reader
so that he or she has to enter into the artwork to complete it.

Techniques of indeterminacy and discontinuity range from
the avoidance of narrative naturalization in Roy Fisher’s The Cut Pages
or the referential and perceptual uncertainties of his short lyrics, to the
invitation of Lee Harwood’s open syntax and collage structure. The development
of collage into what I call techniques of creative linkage (where the linking
is more radical) is a central device in the works of Tom Raworth, Allen Fisher,
Adrian Clarke and Ulli Freer.

Considerations
of metrics reveal the paucity of descriptive terms for new poetic experiments,
which demonstrate the inadequacy of the dated term ‘free verse’, particularly
in the case of the sound and visual poetry of Bob Cobbing, which is a precursor
of the new non-linear poetry found in the radical collage of Maggie O’Sullivan.
In both these cases, and in certain later texts of Allen Fisher, the
transformation of materials plays upon their instability to produce new
meanings. In the case of performance texts their realizations may be unique,
different each time they are attempted.

Indeterminacy
should not be assumed to imply randomness, but a process of working with
contingency in a conscious fashion, even in the procedural and processual works
of a writer like Allen Fisher, where a dialogue between choice and chance, a
precisely stochastic process, ensures that systems are subject to disruptive
interventions by the poet. Clarke’s isoverbalist metrics (counting numbers of
words per line, per poem) is an instance of a closed system which is at one
level an affront to traditional metrics, but one that is arguably as demanding,
a modern constraint rather than a convention authorized by tradition, as the
Oulipo movement defines it. At another level it only works as a vehicle for the
hinging of phrases in an indeterminate syntactic practice, a practice which is
arguably stronger for the tension between its systems.

Instead
of proceeding as though the text is self-evidently a transparent communicative
system (the orthodoxy occasionally takes this view in violation of its works’
obvious constructedness), these poets foreground the fact of the artificiality
of the forms and discourses they employ. In Harwood’s narratives a
self-conscious narrator is often presented, while Roy Fisher’s lyrics often
make ‘the poem’ a counter in its own argument. Allen Fisher deliberately adopts
techniques of ‘process-showing’ in his work. Cobbing’s processual pieces
develop out of previous texts. By foregrounding artifice or construction, the
poem suspends the inevitable act of naturalization; it can be said additionally
to be de-automatizing the reader’s habitual responses, defamiliarizing them, in
that deferral.

If the
prescriptions of the Russian formalists are followed fully, defamiliarization
is thetechnique which defines literature’s very literariness.
However, in its weak from, it is merely used as a descriptive tag, as in the
1980s Movement Orthodoxy’s justification for ludic metaphorization. Too often
it is forgotten that, when in the famous definition of the device, Shklovsky said
‘the purpose of art’ is ‘to impart the sensation of things as they are
perceived not as they are known’ he was not merely pointing to a freshness of
perception, the seeing as though for the first time.He expounded ‘the technique of art’ as
attempting ‘to make objects unfamiliar’, the famous ‘making strange’ of the
more colloquial translation of the Russian ostrananie. It is often
ignored that to effect an increase in ‘the difficulty and length of perception’
it is necessary not just to admit an estranging ‘content’, but to ‘make forms
difficult’. This is not a question of likening a flowerpot to a fez as in a
poem by Craig Raine, but of using the variety of formal techniques of
indeterminacy and discontinuity, of foregrounding artifice and construction,
outlined here.

A poem is
an object, but it is also part of the reader’s responses, since he or she must
complete it; any reader, in Umberto Eco’s words ‘is bound to supply his own
existential credentials’. 8 This is, as the theoreticians of
reception aesthetics have noted, an active fact of interpretation in both
structurally closed works, and in the kinds of work examined here, such as the
playful defamiliarized lyricism of Roy Fisher, for example. However, in other
kinds of open works often offered by some writers of the British alternatives,
who work in deliberate collusion with this fact, this is crucial. Eco calls
artworks with such a radical structural indeterminacy and discontinuity ‘works
in movement’ which he characterizes as involving ‘the possibility of numerous
different personal interventions.’Eco
defines this limit case of an ‘open work’ as one that is ‘literally
“unfinished”: the author seems to hand them to the performer more or less like
the components of a construction kit.’ Harwood has at times thought of his work
in this way, as leaving textual lacunae for a reader to complete. Yet Clarke’s
syntactic play and catachresis also achieve this. Cobbing has indeed presented
texts to be realized in performance from a few visual clues.

Allen
Fisher has most fully theorized this in relation to his own poetics. Poetry is
at its most pertinent when fresh significations are produced by an active
reader. A text is judged on its ability to escape the writer and invigorate the
reader’s engagement. It is assumed that this is effected by means of technique:
modes of creative linkage are utilized to present a plurivocal text to which a
reader brings his or her existential credentials, which are, like the text
itself, the results of historical and social processes.

This emphasis upon the activity of reading brings us
back to Forrest-Thomson’s notion of naturalization to focus upon and emend the
distinctions she makes between good and bad naturalization. As opposed to
reducing ‘the strangeness of poetic language ...by translating it in to a statement about the
non-verbal external world, by making the Artifice appear natural’, a reading
practice with which most of the Movement Orthodoxy is complicit, and which she
defines as ‘bad’ naturalization, she argues that ‘Good naturalization dwells on
the non-meaningful levels of poetic language, such as phonetic and prosodic
patterning and spatial organization, and tries to state their relationship to
other levels of organization rather than set them aside in an attempt to
produce a statement about the world’. Charles Bernstein argues that all levels
of poetry, any discernable device, should be regarded as meaningful, but he
merely widens the premises of one of the only attempts in the 1970s to develop
a poetics of British poetry. The
whole text signifies for the engaged reader, as he or she enters it; ‘Whatever
else I may get from a work of art,’ argues Allen Fisher, ‘because its dominant
function is aesthetic it requires my engagement to create it, to produce it.’Its artifice may not be willed away, in all
its particularity and, even, in the case of some of the work I will be
examining, its peculiarity; its artifice has to be read because no ‘paraphrase’
is accurate or full enough, or, in some cases, possible. Forrest-Thomson’s
general account of artifice and naturalization reminds the reader always of the
strangeness of technique, that to only read ‘formal features’ as ‘noteworthy
components of the poem’ if they ‘can be shown to contribute to a thematic
synthesis that is stated in terms of the external world’, is a denial of
poetry’ singularity.She quotes Wittgenstein: ‘Do not forget ...
that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information is not
used in the language-game of giving information.’

Accounts of the second level may be read here, and the third level here. And a lot that was thought-through here first, turns up in my more recent project The Meaning of Form. See here.

from 'The Given', part one, the introductory poem, 'I remember' (to contrast with the unread 'I don't remember...' litany of the prose that follows; read my talk on writing The Given here); (Read Alan Baker's review of The Givenhere.)

from 'Arrival', the two short poems announcing the arrival of the rival, again to contrast with the prose which I had read at the Blue Bus the last time I read. (One was the final poem here.)

from 'When', I read the whole of 'Work', the final piece of the book which distends time (and is 'about' or 'round and about' work.

I also read Lee Harwood's 'One, Two, Three', in homage to the man (with whom I read at the Blue Bus, as I was to explain two days later in Brighton).

In the second half I read all of the 'Petrarch 3' sequence. (See here for its inception.) As usual the audience went silent for the Jimmy Savile poem. The presence of dedicatee and semi-onlie begetter Tim Atkins was especially appreciated.

The other readings were exciting and the evening seemed especially magic, with so many unexpected faces (some of whom I would meet again on the Thursday at the Lee Harwood celebration; see here).

Tuesday, September 01, 2015

In The Poetry of Saying (2005),
to which I refer across this blog, and also in my new work-in-critical-progress, The Meaning of Form, (particularly in the footnotes I comment on
here; but access the whole project here) I argue that Linguistically Innovative Poetry (and that of the British
Poetry Revival before it) may be best seen as regards to a tripartite theory,
involving three levels: the technical, the social and political, and the
ethical. (It is interesting I didn’t say The Formal, though the second is
subtitled ‘The Poetics of Form’ .) I shall post on each of these levels
separately.

The technical level concerns
techniques of indeterminacy and discontinuity, of collage and creative linkage,
of poetic artifice and defamiliarization.(Read about this level here.)

The
social and political level concerns itself with a reading of the necessary
dialogic nature of all utterance, including the kinds of poetry offered here.
This will build on the technical devices described, ones which animate the
reading process into necessary dialogue. (And this level is dealt with here.)

The
ethical level of analysis extends from the first two levels into an
understanding of the varieties of openness to the other implied by the
techniques and social orientation of the work. (This level may be found described, and the thesis completed, here.)

See here for contents and original availability. The book is out of print (literally no longer in print) but may be obtained second hand, via Amazon and its associated book-sellers, and electronically from Liverpool University Press, which is the book's future, of course. Start here: